


The Best Ending

by Bibliotecaria_D



Series: After the End [2]
Category: Transformers Generation One
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-31
Updated: 2012-01-31
Packaged: 2017-10-30 10:06:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/330564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bibliotecaria_D/pseuds/Bibliotecaria_D
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life keeps going after the Apocalypse. Vortex doesn’t want to die, even when he should.</p><p> </p><p>  <i>"It’s worth a try."</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Best Ending

**Title:** The Best Ending  
 **Warnings:** Character death, self-hate  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Continuity:** G1, Season 3 - After the End AU  
 **Characters:** Swindle, Vortex, Combaticons  
 **Disclaimer:** The theatre doesn’t own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.  
 **Motivation (Prompt):** _"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one." - Oscar Wilde_

[* * * * *]

The way the gestalt link worked, they shared bits and pieces of themselves through it whether they wanted to or not. The terminal linkages installed into their spark chambers facilitated combining, but it also prohibited separation. 

Not disconnecting from Bruticus. That was physical, and it felt weird in ways they got used to: the give and take as their bodies meshed together and opened autonomous pathways of energon and electricity into a larger circulatory system through them. They combined -- one large body made of five smaller forms that disappeared into a finely-knitted network of machinery -- and resumed using their unconnected bodies once Bruticus came apart. 

No, the kind of separation it prevented was the one they desired most: straightforward, blessed isolation inside their own minds. At the spark level, though, that had been made impossible. They'd been rebuilt and freed and chained in one stroke, and they both loved and hated Starscream for that fool's gold freedom. 

They hadn't been gestalt long. In terms of the war, they'd been individuals longer than they'd been the component parts of Bruticus. Swindle had been the most independent of all of them. The rest of them had at least been a combat unit before the Detention Center. Swindle, when it came down to the trial sentencing, had simply been at the wrong place at the wrong time on the wrong side. He'd been an accessory to Onslaught's grand plan, but not a real accomplice. He wasn’t even a military mech. He was an independent civilian trader with a lot of military contacts, and he’d only been connected to Onslaught as part of the supply chain. Swindle had been guilty of a lot, sure, but not of Onslaught's unit's crime. 

Shockwave had just gotten lucky to catch him, and Onslaught's attempted usurpation had been severe enough to earn a mass sentence on them all.

So there had been the trial, and then the box. Swindle had spent over 4 million years imprisoned beside them in those terrible Detention Center boxes, marinating in the unfairness of his sentence and his loathing for those who boxed him away to rust. He'd never stopped resenting the rest of them for that. 

For a while, he'd actively hated them, but one thing a gestalt didn't allow was hatred directed at itself. It rebounded on the originator as self-hate, and it was so very hard to not understand the hated gestaltmate's point of view on everything. So Swindle cooled down from outright hate. Instead, he seethed, he bemoaned, and he schemed.

Maybe the rest of the Combaticons should have paid more attention to his anger, but it wasn't like they were having an easy time of it. They may have been a combat unit before, but working together had hardly prepared them to be living inside each others’ sparks. Even if they weren't sharing minds, the mingling of sparks through the chamber linkages influenced their thought processes. That...took getting used to. It took mentally sorting out things they didn't particularly want to deal with.

For a while, they hated each other, if not as avidly as Swindle. That might have been why they didn't notice how flashbright his hatred burned. Then they took to trying to grind out or willfully ignore the parts imposed into their minds that they recognized as being _other_. It didn't work, but, oh, they gave it their all trying. 

Vortex tore his quarters to pieces after botching an Autobot interrogation, shouting abuse at Brawl the whole time; the bruiser's inherent violence had led him to lose his temper, which had been an unforgiveable error at the delicate time it happened. Brawl himself hung back in combat, optics unexpectedly calculating, then shook himself sharply and spent half a shift glaring in concentrated fury at Onslaught. Onslaught ripped Blast Off's chest open in a crazed attempt to tear the shuttle out of himself; the gestalt leader had apparently sneered contemptuous dismissal right in Megatron's face. Astrotrain and Blitzwing restrained him in time, although they hadn't a clue as to what brought on the Combaticon commander's berserker rage. They assumed the earlier beat-down from Megatron had damaged something in Onslaught's head. Blast Off had been most unhelpful when they asked him about it, leading them into an oddly-worded circle of questions-answering-questions that left the triple changers realizing only once he'd left that they'd gotten no answers at all. 

The shuttle had walked into the Combaticons' base after that, stoically punched Vortex through a wall, and ordered him to, _"Stay out of my head, or I will kill you."_

Not that they could. The threat rang empty even as Blast Off said it, and the shuttle's body language held a sort of helpless bluff. Vortex looked up at him in weary understanding and didn't bother to respond. Even Brawl, ignorant as he could sometimes be, knew down to his rootmode struts that killing a gestaltmate would be like destroying his own spark. They couldn't do it.

It never occurred to them to wonder why Swindle never reacted. The conmech must have been the most influenced, as a civilian contractor prior to their internment. He’d been thrust into war to fight with reactions and abilities not his own. He wasn't a noncombatant, but he'd never been strictly military, and they should have seen the contrast of _before Detention_ and _after Detention_ in the light of their own problems with the gestalt bonds. 

They should have realized, but Swindle never shut up. He complained about the little things. He went on and on about minor irritations until he became a major annoyance in his own right, and they learned to tune him out. He held so close to himself that they assumed the little deceptive twists of thoughts were their own, because the loud, obvious personality he wore had nothing to it of the sly trickster. They dismissed the Swindle they saw and never noticed who slinked through the back of their minds and lent their sparks his devious nature. 

They all knew they couldn't kill each other. So they began to adjust to the way things were now, because there wasn't a way to escape it. 

It wasn't so bad, really. Not once they accepted their new reality. Vortex started to enjoy using his temper in interrogations, and he deliberately opened himself to Blast Off's influence in direct counterpoint immediately after explosions of anger. His terrifying reputation grew further. Blast Off let Brawl's subprograms guide him in close combat, and Brawl gleefully let him in exchange for a wider perspective on the battlefield as a whole. Brawl let Onslaught's strategies restrain his headstrong nature, and Onslaught, well, the Combaticon leader was a tactician. Using what resources he had was what he did. 

They collectively didn't think much of Swindle at all. When they did, it was mostly annoyance. Some anger, a dash of derision, and a little greed for the only thing they thought he brought to the Combaticons: contacts and money.

Except that Swindle had been independent a very, very long time, and he'd resented what this unit had done to and taken away from him for almost as long. Now that they were imposed on him as a gestalt, that resentment congealed into something darker yet. But he knew good business, conmech to the core, so he smiled and laughed. He gave them his greed and his duplicitous thoughts, but on the surface, he dazzled them with shine and flash. A smile always there, a laugh always ready; they greased team dynamics like bribes greasing palms. 

He got along with them because he had to, and they never questioned why he never interacted with them. It didn't seem important. After all, killing a gestaltmate was impossible. They were s intertwined, by now the Combaticons had forgotten how to be individuals. The pain to sever that kind of connection was unimaginable.

Swindle had been independent a very long time, but he'd had partners before. Funny, but the new ones never wondered about what happened to the old ones. He really was just that good. He laughed when he met his new friends, and he laughed when he had no more use for them, one way or another. That was the best way to do business. Emotional attachments were painful when severed, but it was a necessary pain. 

There was a way to get out of every partnership. He couldn't kill these 'partners,' but that didn't mean he couldn't escape them. It took immersing himself into the bond completely, but the pay-off came, as planned, right after one particularly bad battle. The other four Combaticons dropped offline into statis lock because their core programming trusting the gestalt bond. The gestalt bond that they had all come to trust, relying on it more and more as part of themselves. Their core programming recognized that one of the gestalt was awake, and he would protect them. So the program said, so their gestalt links confirmed, and so Swindle didn’t.

He didn't laugh when he got rid of them, but he got rid of them nonetheless.

He sold them, and when they were restored, it came as a total shock to them. The other four Combaticons could only stare in spark-deep confusion at the stranger in their midst. The smile had disappeared. The jovial salesmech mask had dropped when Megatron forced him to bring them back, and what was left wasn’t their gestaltmate. At least, not as they knew him, and it shocked them to their cores to realize they had no idea who Swindle was.

They'd come back online to the insincere sniveling of a caught mech, but in the brig, he compacted to a grim, silent shadow of the personae they'd thought they knew. What he really was twisted through them, an oiled snake of treachery that burrowed into their shared sparks. Open hostility flared through the gestalt bonds and burnt like raw wounds scored into their own psyches. It hurt them, and it hurt him too, but he accepted the pain to punish them. 

They sent Vortex in to talk to him, because this wasn’t questioning a gestaltmate. This was interrogation of a prisoner. 

The helicopter looked at the Jeep. The Jeep glared back at the helicopter. The interrogation felt backward, turned on Vortex, before either of them spoke a word. 

_"I don't want to die,"_ Swindle said, relaxed about it as only the defeated could be, _"but being a Combaticon...being one of you? I couldn't do it."_ He snorted, and finally looked away. 

Vortex unexpectedly felt uneasy, and it took digging into his own spark to find it was an aspect of Swindle himself, ill at ease with telling the truth to a mark. That somehow made it worse as he became aware that Swindle was using the bits of him, Vortex, to manipulate the situation. Vortex had no idea who this mech was, but Swindle had spent years in the bond subtly worming his way through their minds. Now he could turn it back on them, and the other Combaticons didn’t even know where to begin with him. 

It was scary, finding out part of their own minds had betrayed them, but Swindle only sneered through the bars. _"It was worth a try. Know what I found out?"_ A humorless laugh informed Vortex that he really didn't want to know what Swindle had found out. The Jeep told him anyway. _"I'd have had to take you all back in the end. In a week, two at most, it would have been unbearable. You weren't dead, but you were gone. Here,"_ the Jeep tapped his windshield over his spark chamber, _"where a program flush couldn't stop the ache. Not a pain, but an absence. Like wishing for solid ground under my tires in space. Like being in the box again. You know what I mean?"_

Vortex knew exactly what Swindle described. He intimately knew what he meant. It scored into his mind, and raked through the gestalt links.

The words never left them after that. Even after Swindle sullenly joined the team for real, Vortex felt them remember. It stood between them while they combined: ripples of disquiet over the bonds, a hesitation in the linkages, and the way Swindle never laughed around them again. Ever. The simple words disturbed Vortex every time the conmech flashed that dazzling fake smile at another mark, laughed his phony laugh for the other Decepticons.

"You're not dead, but you're gone," he said to the slowly graying body jumbled on the ground. The linkages he'd snapped to break away from Bruticus' corpse flamed with the pain of a thousand suns, but already the throbbing faded before the numbness spreading over the surface of his spark. Swindle had been right: the pain was bearable. It was the absence that would kill him. "I don't want to die, either."

Swindle didn't answer. In his head, Vortex could imagine what he'd say, however. _"It’s worth a try."_ Back to the wall, pinned by spark-deep connection to something he'd hated for four million years, Swindle had still tried. How could Vortex not?

He knelt, and reached behind the shattered windshield. He remembered as hard as he could, applying memories like bandages to the empty spaces gaping inside his own chest. He tried, and all the while he remembered that moment in the brig, and he remembered Swindle's words.

But mostly he remembered the laughter, long after it stopped.


End file.
